New in Town (2009)

(In French, On TV, November 2020) It doesn’t take more than five minutes for New in Town to establish without ambiguity that it fully intends to follow the most obvious of romantic comedy formulas. As a young ambitious urban executive (Renee Zellweger, at the end of her pouty-squinty period) is transplanted from Miami to Minnesota to take over an underperforming manufacturing plan, she meets-cute the union shop steward and falls under the irresistible spell of the local community. You can write the rest of the script yourself, so little surprise does it contain—at one point, you can scream, “show me the tapioca!” and be richly rewarded by a close-up of said tapioca bowl in a fridge. It’s that kind of film. The same film produced ten years later could have gone political, but this one seems content with spouting off feel-good homilies about small towns, the heartwarming nature of tough winters and the evils of hands-on corporate ownership. Zellweger is not bad in the lead role, although Siobhan Fallon Hogan has a plum role here as the voice of the locals, and Harry Connick Jr. plays the love interest with a decent amount of charm. Don’t get your hopes up in hoping for a militant union film, though — this one scrupulously avoids anything beyond the usual bromides of dubious corporate overlords versus hardworking Midwestern folks… and only the strict minimum at that. New in Town wears its adherence to formula as a badge of honour, so it’s not really clever or insightful to point out how predictable it can be—the real fun of the film is in the set-pieces (such as how to survive being stuck in a snowstorm), the atmosphere of a small snowbound town (it was shot near Winnipeg, Canada) and some of the expected plot points. It’s perhaps best seen as cinematic wallpaper—something to put in the background, fit to be picked up ever few minutes as the film plays on a strictly predictable schedule.